The setting is a house in Bethany, where Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead. At a dinner given in Jesus’s honour, Mary anointed his feet with oil and dried them with her hair. Are you as shocked as I am at what Mary did? It was scandalous! I’m not thinking so much of the waste of money – a whole jar of expensive ointment – a year’s wages – poured away in one lavish gesture! That was bad enough! But it’s not what Mary did with the perfume that was truly shocking. It was what she did with her hair! It was outrageous! Scandalous!
Because, of course, a woman in those days would always keep her hair tied up and usually covered up! Remember the arguments the apostle Paul had with the Corinthians about women keeping their heads covered up! A respectable woman would only let down her hair when she was alone with her husband. Jewish law at that time allowed a man to divorce his wife on the sole grounds that she had let down her hair in front of another man! A respectable woman would never let down her hair in public! And then to touch a man’s feet with her hair. That was a very intimate action. And in front of strangers! That would raise a few eyebrows even today here in England. But in those days, in the Middle East! It was a scandal! A disgrace!
In today’s liberal society it’s hard to find a comparison that would shock us quite so much. It would probably take even more than a woman at a dinner party taking all her clothes off in front of a houseful of special guests to shock us as much as those guests in Bethany would have been astonished. It was so outrageous! So “O.T.T.” So “Over The Top!”
Of course, it was a gesture of love. Mary loved Jesus. For years, Jesus had been warning his disciples that it was part of his mission to go up to Jerusalem and suffer and be killed. But none of them had been listening, none of them understood it or believed it, except for Mary. She knew why Jesus was going to Jerusalem. Maybe she even put two and two together and realised that with Passover only a week away that Jesus had only a week left to live. So Mary wanted to take this opportunity, possibly the last opportunity she would ever have, to show Jesus just how great her love was. Not romantic love, not sexual love, but the true Christian devotion that all disciples should have for their Lord and Master. Mary loved Jesus so much! So she anointed Jesus with the most precious possession she owned, a whole bottle of expensive perfume. And Mary could have remembered to bring a towel to dry his feet. But instead she chose that most shocking and intimate gesture – she let down her hair and dried his feet with her hair.
Incredibly intimate! Shameful! Appalling! Indecent! Immoral! But that’s how deep Mary’s love for Jesus was. She probably hadn’t even thought about how other people would interpret her actions. She didn’t care. She just wanted to show her Lord just how precious He was to her. So she went totally “Over The Top.”
Of course the critics came charging in!
4 One of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, 5 “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.”
Good point! Even if Judas was only interested in stealing the money rather than giving it to the poor and needy, it was a waste. The other disciples started saying the same thing. What would Jesus have to say about that?
7 “Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. And Matthew and Mark continue the story like this. “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me.
“A beautiful thing”. No criticism. No condemnation. But appreciation. Was Jesus perhaps even grateful?
She has done a beautiful thing to me. 11 The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. 12 When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial.
Jesus saw a spiritual significance in what Mary had done, maybe even beyond Mary’s intentions. This anointing looked ahead in prophetic symbolism to his death and his burial. There would be other opportunities to help the poor. But this was the one and only chance Mary would have to show her love for Jesus. We must always make sure that we are not so preoccupied with the demands of everyday service that we miss out on unique opportunities for special encounters with God.
Again Matthew and Mark include an important an important element of the story. Listen to what Jesus said.
13 I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”
Told in memory of her. The spiritual significance of Mary’s action was not the most important thing. What would be remembered everywhere and forever was Mary herself –– her love, her devotion! This story is still told in memory of her.
Because this is the most important point in the story. Jesus welcomed Mary’s devotion, even though Mary went completely Over The Top. Even though she got totally carried away, and did something which everybody else found outrageous and shocking and scandalous for all kinds of reasons, Jesus’s reaction is very different. “She has done a beautiful thing for me.” Everybody else there was criticising what Mary had done. Instead Jesus says “leave her alone, why are you bothering this woman”?
What this story shows us very clearly above everything else is that it is ALRIGHT to go Over The Top in our devotion for Jesus. If we get carried away in our love for Jesus – that’s OK! There were lots of people there at that dinner party just a week before Jesus died. But Mary was the one who actually did things right! Her devotion to Jesus was so great that she couldn’t hold it in – and so she made an exhibition of herself. And that was OK! That was ALRIGHT! That was acceptable to God.
When did you last go “Over The Top” for Jesus? The big problem we have is that there is not much risk of us following in Mary’s footsteps. We’re English – always reserved, stiff upper lip and all that. We English are terrified of ever going “over the top” like Mary did. We’re afraid of extremes. We act as if it is always wrong to have too much of anything, as if it’s wrong to have too much enthusiasm, or too much zeal or too much love or too much joy or too much excitement or too much holiness. We insist on moderation in everything. So there’s not much of a risk that any of us would love Jesus so much that we would get carried away like Mary did. To be so devoted to God that we get to the point of not caring what anybody else might think of us. We would never go “Over The Top!” Even for Jesus! But that’s a problem!
So what else can we learn from Mary going O.T.T. for Jesus? There are at least FOUR things.
1. EXTRAVAGANT GENEROSITY
Mary used up a whole year’s wages worth of perfume in one wild extravagant gesture of generosity. So generous she even smashed the jar so that every last drop could be used to anoint Jesus. The Bible has lots and lots to teach us about the use of wealth and possessions. Christians in this country tend to stick to the bits which talk about careful stewardship of the resources God has entrusted to us. We tend to gloss over the bits which talk about extravagant generosity.
But remember that greedy tax collector Zaccheus. When he realised that the grace of God extended even to a miserable sinner like him, Zaccheus really went O.T.T in extravagant generosity, giving away half his possessions to the poor, and paying back everybody he had cheated four times over! When were you last outrageously extravagantly generous? 
You can’t take it with you! So why do we Christians so often cling on to what we’ve got? When instead we could give it away in extravagant generosity. Take the “Rich Young ruler” test. What would you do if Jesus said to YOU, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Luke 18:22.) What would YOU do?
Extravagant generosity and
2. JOYFUL CELEBRATION
We English aren’t very good at joyful celebration either. We don’t really know how to have a really good time at a party! We don’t have the temperament. We are too inhibited! Mary really did let her hair down! But usually we (us respectable Christians anyway) are too concerned about what other people will think. We don’t like to let our feelings show!
Remember that Jailer at Philippi when he heard the gospel. Acts 16:33f
he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God- he and his whole family.
When were you last filled with joy in your Christian life. I have spent some time in churches in Uganda and in Zambia and I took part in services which lasted two or three hours and then led on to shared meals together which lasted most of the afternoon. Those African Christians had none of all the material possessions we take for granted. But they had joy! They really knew how to celebrate God’s goodness to them.
Somebody once said, “If one-tenth of what you believe is true, you Christians ought to be ten times as excited as you are.” A famous conductor once dislocated his shoulder while leading an orchestra. Very few Christians are at risk of dislocating anything in our enthusiasm for God! When did you last get completely carried away in “Over the Top” joyful celebration? 
Extravagant generosity, joyful celebration and
3. INTIMATE WORSHIP
Here was striking intimacy. A respectable woman would only normally let down her hair in the presence of her husband. Yet this is what Mary does to express her lavish devotion for her Lord. Here is another thing that many of us have big problems in doing. We simply don’t know how to let go of our inhibitions and tell God how much we love Him! Many of us struggle with intimacy with God.
Sometimes some people do go Over the Top in worship. They say things and do things in their worship and adoration of God which I find uncomfortable and embarrassing because they seem too intimate. But this story tells me not to judge others! Because Jesus did not criticise the intimacy of Mary’s love and adoration. Instead he says, “Leave her alone”. “She has done a beautiful thing to me.”
We need to learn that it’s OK for Christians to go O.T.T. for Jesus. On the day of Pentecost the first Christians were so exuberant praising God that the crowds thought they were drunk. Lots of very O.T.T. things have been happening in churches around the world when the Holy Spirit is at work even in the years that I have been a minister. The charismatic movement in the 1970s brought the spiritual gift of speaking in tongues into mainstream churches. There was John Wimber and the Signs and Wonders movement in the 1980s and “the Toronto Blessing ” in the 1990s. When we hear about other Christians getting carried away in their worship, we need to make sure that we don’t rush in to condemn them.
A short lived revival broke out in 2008 in Ignited Church at Lakeland in Florida. My wife and I happened to be on holiday nearby and we went along to see the miracles of healing and deliverance God was working. I will never forget one thing the speaker said.
“A fanatic is only a person who loves God more than you do.”
“A fanatic is only a person who loves God more than you do.”
We can so easily be like Judas – rushing in to criticise and complain, over-cautious and reserved, never taking any risks. But I’m sure that God actually wants us all to be more like Mary sometimes. I’m certain God would love to see some more heartfelt enthusiasm and sincere O.T.T. passion in US sometimes! I’m sure that if we are loving God with ALL our heart and ALL our soul and ALL our strength and ALL our mind then we OUGHT TO find ourselves going Over The Top in intimate worship sometimes.
Extravagant generosity, joyful celebration, intimate worship, and to cap it all, everything was so
4. SHAMELESS and PUBLIC
When did you last show your love for God in such a shameless and public way? When did you last make an exhibition of yourself witnessing for Christ? I became a Christian at the age of 16 in the 1970s. Those were the days of the Jesus People, and evangelists like the American Baptist Arthur Blessitt, who died at the beginning of this year. Starting in 1968, over 56 years, Arthur Blessitt walked over 43,000 miles through 324 counties and territories carrying a wooden cross twelve feet long and six feet wide. His example influenced my own witnessing. When I was first saved at the age of 16 I went totally Over The Top in telling other people about Jesus. I wore a great big wooden cross around my neck on a leather strap at school and then through university to tell the world I believed in Jesus: my schoolmates and teachers and then the whole college and all the chemistry students and the lecturers and the university sports team I played for and even in tutorials with professors – everybody knew I was a Christian! Looking back, it was outrageous!
The expression, “going over the top” comes from the first World War, when soldiers needed to climb over the top from the safety of the trenches to go into battle. For very many Christians in England today, faith has become a very private thing, something we don’t even tell our friends. It is very sad how many Christians are afraid to go “over the top” in evangelism and witnessing. We HAVE TO tell people about Jesus. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me!” We HAVE TO tell the world. If we love God and if we love our neighbours, the loving thing to do will never be to stay silent. The loving thing will always be to speak, to shout, to warn, to persuade, to pray so that our friends do not drift on to a lost eternity. Mary was shameless in revealing her devotion to Jesus in such a public way. We should be too!
In Luke chapter 7 we read about another dinner party when a different woman went “Over The Top” in her love for Jesus. Jesus told a parable about two men who owed money to a money-lender, and here was the punchline. I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven – for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little.”
At Bethany, Mary’s love for Jesus was so great that she got completely carried away! Her story is told in memory of her. But what about us? He who has been forgiven little loves little.
God loves you and me SO much! But how much do we love Jesus? Where is our response of extravagant generosity? How about a bit of joyful celebration sometimes? Maybe even some truly intimate worship? And when did you last get into trouble for making an exhibition of yourself in public, shouting out your love for God so shamelessly. I think we could all afford to go Over The Top for Jesus a bit more. Don’t you agree? After all – “A fanatic is only a person who loves Jesus more than we do!”

Since September we have been thinking about prayer. Prayer as our connection with God. Confidence in prayer. Abraham’s prayers of intercession. Prayer our first weapon not a last resort. Prayer a game changer. Prayer and healing. Experiencing God’s peace through prayer. Most of the time we have been thinking about our own personal times of prayer. But this morning I want us to think instead about praying with other people: praying together. Many parts of the Bible talk about our individual prayers. But just as many places talk about God’s people meeting to pray together.
Let’s think about the book of Acts.
Even before Pentecost – Acts 1:14 They all joined together constantly in prayer,
The earliest days of the church – Acts 2 42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
Meeting together for prayer Acts 3:1 One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer—at three in the afternoon.
After the Jewish leaders commanded the apostles not to preach about Jesus any more, we read about the first Christians,
Acts 4:24 they raised their voices together in prayer to God.
4 31 After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.
When Peter was put in prison in Acts 12, God sent an angel to set him free by a miracle. But this was just in response to the first Christians praying together. When Peter was free,
he went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying. Acts 12:12.
I am sure you don’t need any more examples of the importance of Christians praying, not just by ourselves, but praying together. But in case you still need convincing, let me remind you that Jesus himself encourages us to pray together!
‘Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.’ (Matthew 18:19-20)
In those two verses Jesus makes two very clear promises. The second promise (in order of the saying) is that Jesus the Risen Christ is present when believers meet together in some special way in which He is not present with them when they are apart and alone. “Where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them.” And this presence of God is linked in some way to the first promise Jesus makes, which is that God the Father will answer the prayers of believers who come together in agreement about what they are praying for. Praying together is more powerful than praying alone and separately.
This truth is already abundantly clear from other parts of Scripture. And here Jesus is specifically promising to bless Christians who meet together and pray together. We pray together in our Sunday services. We pray together in our monthly church prayer meeting. We pray together in our homegroups. Many churches meet together for mornings of prayer and days of prayer. But praying together doesn’t have to be in a group, large or small. Jesus says, “wherever two or three”. The minimum number meeting together to claim these promises is precisely two. And that is what I want us to focus on for the rest of our time this morning: the great blessings of meeting together in twos or threes.
A few weeks ago Bill Turner mentioned the value of prayer partnerships, praying in pairs or in triplets. These have always been an important part of growing churches and I have always encouraged them in my churches, not least because I have found meeting with others so helpful myself. After three months of Sabbatical study in 2008 I wrote a lot about prayer partnerships in my first full-length book, Making Disciples One-to-One.
When two or three people who regularly meet to talk about God and pray together are at roughly the same stage in their Christian experience, writers use expressions like “Prayer Partners”, “Spiritual Friendships”, or “Soul Friends”. Sadly in this individualistic age, many Christians have yet to discover the blessings of meeting with others in pairs or triplets. So today I want to give you Ten Great Reasons for meeting and praying together One-to-one. Any one of these great blessings would be reason enough for believers to begin to meet together and share their spiritual lives in prayer partnerships but today I am going to give you ten.
1. Jesus tells us to pray together
Praying together as a pair or in a triplet is good. Jesus is with us in a special way when we meet. Intercessions carry more power because they are united. Of course, when two or three Christians meet together to pray they don’t just pray. They talk about the Bible and what God has been showing them. They talk through their problems. They share their lives together. Praying for each other is good. Praying through each other’s decisions and problems is good. And having somebody else committed to praying for your personal spiritual growth is guaranteed to be good – because God answers prayer.
2. Anybody can do it!
We can’t always give lots of time to lots of other people – but everybody can give time to just one or two! Even Home Groups can’t be just right for everybody all the time. But meeting One-to-One will always be at just the right level for both. A meeting of just two is totally flexible – you can always get together when you want to.
When two or three people meet with the intention and the expectation of praying together and talking about Christian things, this gives freedom to actually talk about Christ without awkwardness or embarrassment; because that is the very reason you are meeting. And there are things you would be prepared to share One-to-One which you would never share even in a Home Group. You can feel amazingly safe. Going on a journey into unknown territory it always feels better to share that adventure with somebody else than going there by yourself, especially if the other person has been there before.
3. Dialogue teaches the parts monologue can’t teach
Back in the 1990s, I wrote a booklet of resources for Christian education which was published by the Baptist Union. In it I came up with a slogan people seemed to like, stolen of course from a popular advert: “Dialogue teaches the parts monologue can’t teach”. There are all kinds of things which we can learn much better by talking about them and by doing them with other people than just by reading or by listening to a professor or a preacher talking about them. Talking things through with another person brings so many blessings – blessings for you and blessings for person you are meeting with so double the blessings! Talking helps us understand the things we have heard in sermons or read in books. It helps us think through decisions we are making and find ways through problems we face. It brings encouragement in difficult times and helps us keep going when we feel like giving up. And then we pray through all the things we have been talking about.
So often Christians only talk to another person about their faith when problems arise. The wonderful thing about meeting regularly meeting in twos or threes is that in times of trial the relationship of “sustaining friends” already exists.
4. Opening up to each other is opening up to God
If we really mean business with God we need to open up every part of our lives to Him. And an important way of doing this is to open up our lives to other people. Many Christians are afraid of doing this. I am afraid of letting other people see “the real me” because then they would realise (in the words of Michael Caine’s character in the film Educating Rita) “there is less to me than meets the eye”.
But I really do need to let somebody else in on “the real me” because only then, when I am truly being myself, only then can God really begin to change me. Christians need to learn to open up to each other, Sharing emotions, sadness, anger, disappointment or discouragement with each other is the same as sharing these feelings with God. When we have poured out our heart to our friend, and we know our friend understands, then we can be assured that God also has heard and understood us. It is very healthy to have a spiritual context where we can uncork the bottle! And then we pray together about the issues where we are struggling.
5. Confession and absolution helps deal with sin
In the battle against the world, the flesh and the devil, having a Christian friend standing with you can make all the difference. Through history the church has known the value of confession and absolution. Jesus has given to all Christians the authority to declare sins forgiven. As Bill Turner reminded us, James 5:16 makes this invitation. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. In the process of Christian holiness, turning away from sin and being transformed into the image of Christ, every Christian can benefit from having a friend to whom he could confess his or her sins. That friend could offer the blessing of declaring those sins forgiven.
6. Discipleship, like salvation, is intended to be shared
In twenty-first century Western Christianity, the focus in our understanding of salvation is almost entirely individual. We are concerned about our personal relationship with God. In the Bible, salvation is very different. It is corporate. We are saved into the Body of Christ of which each of us is only one single part. We are part of the family of God, being built into the Temple of the Holy Spirit. We are saved together and being disciples is something we are supposed to do together.
Christians can be so individualistic. “It’s my faith and my life, and I can live it as I want to.” That is NOT right. That is the attitude of the footballer who hogs the ball instead of passing it around the team. It’s the attitude of the tuba player who plays in any key he chooses, any notes he wants, ignoring the conductor and the rest of the orchestra and thinks it doesn’t matter. Richard Foster, who wrote Celebration of Discipline, also wrote, “None of us is supposed to live the Christian life alone. We gain help and strength from others.”
We know we should be more motivated and committed than we are to praying. It’s good to pray when we feel like it – it is even better to pray when we don’t feel like it, and even in times when we feel we cannot pray at all, because we have made the commitment to God and to the other person that we will meet.
7. Seeing Christ in each other
In his book, “Tortured for Christ”, Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand wrote that when he was imprisoned for his faith, he saw the suffering of his fellow prisoners and asked, “If that were Christ, would you give Him your blanket?” The parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25:31-46 reminds us that when we love and serve our neighbour we are loving and serving Christ Himself. Somebody once asked Mother Teresa of Calcutta how she could work with the untouchables and the sick and the dying? Her answer was that she sees Jesus in each one of the people she helps. So as she serves and cares for those who are dying she is serving and caring for Christ Himself. The best way to learn to see Christ in others is to develop a close relationship with a fellow Christian. Meeting with Christ in another person is a wonderful way of experiencing the presence of Christ in ordinary everyday life.
8. Things “better caught than taught”
There are many things in life which we learn by watching others. The piano teacher, the driving instructor, the personal trainer and the life coach all show us HOW TO do what we want to do. The best way to learn to speak French is to spend time with a French person. So also in the Christian life there are individuals who inspire and encourage us by their passion in prayer, their boldness in evangelism, their commitment to holiness and their complete devotion to God. From their examples we learn skills, attitudes character. We learn hospitality, patterns of prayer and devotional reading. We learn how to cope with life. We seek to imitate their work/life/church balance. We are fired by their wisdom, zeal and love. They are our role models. We catch their faith. And as other people share their lives with us, we learn from them how to share our own life with other people. And the best place for this kind of Christian learning and growing is One-to-One, praying in a pair or a triplet. I am so grateful for so many ways I have benefitted over the years from meeting with other Christians, some ministers and others not.
9. Exercising Spiritual Gifts
The safety of a One-to-One relationship is the perfect context for learning how to recognise God’s voice and deliver God’s messages. The Bible teaches the prophet-hood of all believers. Every Christian has received that Holy Spirit who inspired the prophets so potentially every Christian may exercise prophetic gifts (Acts 2:17-18; 38-39). Meeting and praying together One-to-One is a wonderful place to explore listening to God and exercising spiritual gifts like prophecy.
10. God gives us other Christians so we can practise His kind of love
A very good way to learn to love your enemies is to practise by loving your friends! God gives us other Christians so we can learn to love and accept and forgive each other. The challenge of just making space for somebody else in our busy lives is good for us as we learn to really listen to them so that we will better at listening to others. We need to practise helping others. We need to learn how to to be Jesus to other people. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. (1 John 4:20)
Again, many of us find it incredibly difficult to talk to other people about Jesus. Sharing our story One-to-One with our prayer partners is good practice for sharing with Home Group, then with other friends, then with strangers.
So there you are – 10 Great Reasons for meeting together with one or two other Christians to pray and study and talk.
1. Jesus tells us to pray together.
2. Anybody can do it!
3. Dialogue teaches the parts monologue can’t teach
4. Opening up to each other is opening up to God
5. Confession and absolution helps us deal with sin
6. Discipleship, like salvation, is intended to be shared
7. Seeing Christ in each other
8. Things “better caught than taught”
9. Exercising Spiritual Gifts
10. Practising showing God’s kind of love to other Christians
With so many great reasons for meeting One-to-One, it is hard to think why every Christian would not be meeting regularly with others in a prayer partnership or a prayer triplet. And it is so easy to start! Just pray about who you could meet with, and ask them. Don’t dilly dally. Just do it! Remember the wonderful promises about praying together which Jesus makes to all of us.
“Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.”
(Matthew 18:19-20)

Back in 2008, I experienced a revelation. I was watching Doctor Who, played at that time by David Tennant. One short conversation leapt out at me. In the middle of a war which had been going on for generations, Jenny, the Doctor’s Daughter, played by Georgia Moffet, said to the Doctor: “You keep insisting you’re not a soldier but look at you, drawing up strategies like a proper general.”
“No,” said the Doctor, “I’m trying to STOP the fighting.”
To which Jenny replied, “Isn’t every soldier?”
“I’m trying to stop the fighting.” “Isn’t every soldier?” That brought home to me an obvious fact which I think I had always known, but never really appreciated. The purpose of war is to bring peace. The reason soldiers fight is to end the fighting.
In history, many wars have been fought, wrongly, for economic reasons, to gain riches or territory or power. This is still happening in the world today. Such wars are indefensible. But the story of the Doctor’s Daughter helped me appreciate that there can be circumstances where war is justifiable, and even necessary. Where war is the only way to bring peace. When the only way to stop the fighting is to fight.
A friend of mine once described Remembrance as, “A day to mark the highest examples of human bravery and sacrifice, and the worst outworkings of human failure and sin.” That is what we are thinking about on Armistice Day on Tuesday, and on this Remembrance Sunday. We remember with gratitude the endings of the First World War, and the Second World War. We pay tribute to all the people in living memory who have given their lives and others who suffered all kinds of terrible injuries to bring peace to our world and to preserve the freedom we all enjoy today. Jesus said in John 15:13, Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
So we honour those who fought and suffered and gave their lives to stop the fighting by making sure we remember the lessons their deaths can teach us about all the human costs and the tragedies of war.
As I was growing up in the 1960s “Peace” became a catchword and a slogan for many and “pacifism” seemed to claim the idea of peace as its own exclusive possession. But it’s not enough to be against war. We have to be for peace. Very sadly, no war will end all wars. Our hopes for a peaceful future rest on our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. Yet we also have a part to play. Jesus spoke about making peace in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Seventh Beatitude. “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the Sons of God.” Christians are called to be peace-makers, those who actively work to bring peace.
When we think about Peace, we should keep in mind that peace has meaning on at least three levels.
1st Level of Peace – Peace between nations
Historians have looked over monuments and memorials and documents from as early as 3600 BC. Since then there are records of more than 14,000 wars, in which they estimate more than 3.7 billion people have been killed. More than 8000 peace treaties have been made – and broken. In Europe alone over last three centuries there have been more than 300 wars.
Romans 14:19 Let us make every effort to do what leads to peace.
This is as relevant and important in the affairs of nations as it is between individuals. As we work towards peace, the slogan “Peace at any price” is misguided. People who would compromise anything for a quiet life dare not do so. It was Oliver Cromwell who said, “If we would have peace without a worm in it we must lay foundations of justice and righteousness.” Peacemakers do not look for peace at any price. Sometimes passive resistance to evil will not suffice. In some countries at some times, and over some issues within our own nation, God’s peace, God’s righteousness and God’s justice demand action against injustice, corruption, prejudice, immorality, indifference, and against violations of human rights. Love of neighbour calls us to speak out and take a stand against all kinds of wickedness, to overcome evil with good, by prophetic witness, by social and political action, and as a last resort by physical force.
The world today needs peacemakers as much as ever. It makes me sad to reflect that tensions between the global superpowers seem to be greater today than I can remember. There are armed conflicts in Palestine and in Ukraine, and other places too. When the fighting stops there will still be many sacrifices by those who put their lives on the line to help keep the peace. As long as some people are exploiting and oppressing others we will always need to work for peace and justice for those who are being exploited and oppressed.
So we will always be praying for cease-fires and peace processes. But we recognise the tragic reality that there will always be wars and rumours of wars. The world cannot save itself. Diplomacy and politics won’t stop wars. Military might won’t stop wars. The nuclear deterrent won’t stop wars. We don’t need an end to war. Rather, as Roosevelt said, we need an end to all the beginnings of wars. As long as human beings are greedy and proud and arrogant there will always be people who will try to invade others to seize by force what is not theirs. And then there will need to be people who take up arms to protect the innocent and preserve the peace and maintain justice and defend freedom. Soldiers who are required to fight to stop the fighting.
Are you willing to be a peacemaker? God calls Christians to play our part in being peacemakers between nations. By praying for peace, by prophetic witness and political action. We won’t be popular when we stand up to be counted on the side of justice and for peace. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
And as Christians we can share with the world the one true hope for peace. Human sin is great, but God’s love is greater. So the Bible gives us wonderful promises of peace.
Isaiah 11 6 The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.
7 The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
8 The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest.
9They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.
This wonderful hope of peace will come through Jesus, the Prince of Peace.
Isaiah 9 6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 7 Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.
There is hope for peace at the end of days. Until then, blessed are the peacemakers.
2nd Level of Peace – Peace between Neighbours
Romans 12:18 If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone
Each of us is called to live at peace with our neighbours. But being peacemakers is more than just living at peace ourselves. The challenge to Christian people is to bring the peace of God to our own community. Peace in Blackheath and Monkwick and Berechurch and Abberton and Colchester. Our neighbours face all kinds of problems: broken hurting families with partners fighting, children at war with their parents, and neighbours not speaking to each other. Our neighbours need to discover the peace of God which passes all understanding, which sets people free from pain and anger and fear. Our community needs peacemakers. Christian people everywhere must follow Christ the Mediator and work to spread His peace. Where there is hatred let us sow love. We need to be instruments of God’s peace. We need to bring reconciliation.
In the 1960s Pope Paul VI said, “A love of reconciliation is not weakness or cowardice. It demands courage, nobility, generosity, sometimes heroism – an overcoming of oneself rather than of one’s adversary. At times it may even seem like dishonour. In reality it is the patient wise art of peace, of loving, of living with one’s fellows after the example of Christ, with a strength of heart and mind modelled on His.”
Being a peacemaker won’t always be easy or comfortable in our community, on our own doorstep. Trying to bring reconciliation within families. Trying to encourage warring neighbours to talk to each other. Working to break down prejudices and divisions between groups of people and sectors of society. But that is our calling – blessed are the peacemakers.
When I think of 20th century peacemakers I think particularly of Terry Waite. In 1987 he was sent to Lebanon as the envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury to negotiate for the release of four hostages including the journalist John McCarthy. Terry Waite was himself kidnapped and held hostage for four years. It took a year living in the safety of my old college in Cambridge for Terry Waite to recover from his ordeals. Being a peacemaker isn’t easy. Standing in the middle of conflict, attempting to bring warring factions together. Yet God calls each one of us to be a peacemaker between neighbours. We are to be mediators, reconcilers, sources of peace here in Blackheath and Colchester. Are you willing to be a peacemaker? Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
3rd Level of Peace – Peace with God
If we want to be peacemakers we must first receive for ourselves that peace which passes all understanding, that peace of God which Christ alone gives us – which is peace WITH God.
God’s peace is not just the end of war, absence of conflict. God’s peace is not just negative, an absence of something, but very positive: calm, tranquillity, serenity, harmony, reconciliation. The Hebrew word for Peace is shalom and it embraces wholeness, completeness, soundness, well-being. All these very positive conditions come together to make up the peace of God which passes all understanding.
Peace with God is the peace we all need most of all. More than peace between nations. More than peace between neighbours. Every human being needs to be at peace with God.
Isaiah 48:22 AND Isaiah 57:21 both say “There is no peace … for the wicked.” That is absolutely true. Selfishness, rebellion, greed, pride, disobedience, all the things which the Bible calls sin are enemies of God’s true peace. Only God can set us free from these things to experience His peace, His love, His joy. And God does this through His Son, Jesus Christ.
Jesus brings us reconciliation with God. He changes us from God’s enemies into God’s friends.
GOOD NEWS BIBLE: 2 Corinthians 5: 17Anyone who is joined to Christ is a new being; the old is gone, the new has come. 18All this is done by God, who through Christ changed us from enemies into his friends and gave us the task of making others his friends also.
Paul goes on to explain that it was Christ’s death on the cross which dealt with the barrier of sin between human beings and the Holy and righteous God and brings us peace with God.
21Christ was without sin, but for our sake God made him share our sin in order that in union with him we might share the righteousness of God.
As Isaiah 53:5 foretold … he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
We receive God’s peace as we put our trust in Jesus Christ and all he has accomplished on the cross dying in our place for our sins. Jesus Christ is the true Peacemaker – the only source of peace between man and God, that peace which passes all understanding.
But 2 Corinthians 5 continues:
2 Cor 5:18 … (God) gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: be reconciled to God.
It isn’t always easy to be Christ’s ambassadors. It can be hard enough for us here in Colchester to challenge neighbours and friends and strangers with the gospel of Jesus Christ. In parts of the world today Christians are facing brutal persecution. Nigeria is in the news, with Sudan and Yemen, as 1 in 5 Christians are persecuted in Africa. But 2 in 5 Christians in Asia are being persecuted, especially in North Korea and Myanmar but even in India and Bangladesh. The churches have been driven underground in China, Afghanistan and Algeria. Today 380 million Christians worldwide are risking being murdered or imprisoned for their faith. Just for telling people about Jesus. Are you willing to be a peacemaker?
I say again, being a peacemaker will not be easy. It will sometimes cost more than most of us would want to pay. Let me finish by telling you the inspiring story of Saint Telemachus. Telemachus was a monk who lived in a cloistered monastery. In the year 391 he felt God saying to him, “Go to Rome.” When Telemachus arrived in the city, people were crowding the streets. This was the day of the circus when the gladiators would be fighting and killing each other in the coliseum,. Telemachus thought to himself, “Four centuries after Christ and they are still killing each other, for enjoyment?” He came to the coliseum and heard the gladiators saying, “Hail to Caesar, we die for Caesar” and Telemachus thought, “this isn’t right.” He jumped over the railing and went out into the middle of the field, got between two gladiators, held up his hands and said, “In the name of Christ, stop!”
The crowd protested and began to shout, “Run him through, Run him through.” A gladiator hit Telemachus and sent him sprawling in the sand. He got up and ran back and said again, “In the name of Christ, stop!” The crowd continued shouting, “Run him through.” Another gladiator came over and plunged his sword through the little monk’s stomach. He fell into the sand, which turned crimson with his blood. One last time Telemachus gasped, “In the name of Christ stop.” A hush came over the 80,000 people in the coliseum. Soon one man stood and left, then another and more, and within minutes every spectator had left the arena. That was the last-known gladiatorial contest in the history of Rome – thanks to the sacrifice of Saint Telemachus.
Are you willing to be a peacemaker. Peace between nations. Peace in our community. Peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
“Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called Sons of God”.

Have you ever been to a real harvest festival? Back in the 1970s I remember visiting some friends in a tiny village near Stowmarket in Suffolk. The whole community gathered together surrounded by open fields in the shadows of combine harvesters and tractors As the sun was setting we sat on hay bales sharing a barbecue and a barn dance in the open air. For me, a city boy, it was a privilege to celebrate the successful completion of another harvest with the actual workers and families who still grew the food we all eat. Their whole livelihoods depended on a good harvest. That’s what I call a proper harvest festival!

But what is the point for most of us celebrating harvest, some people may ask, when we buy all everything we eat from the supermarkets? We don’t have any part in producing our food. Of course it is good to be reminded of our dependence on the natural world and of the vital part which farmers play in keeping us nourished. But this morning I want to suggest at least three other reasons why it is important to celebrate harvest.

1. WE SHOULD BE GRATEFUL FOR GOD’S BLESSINGS

G.K. Chesterton — ‘When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.’

There are so many different kinds of food for us to enjoy. The Great British Bake Off reminds us that even “our daily bread” comes in so many different shapes and flavours.
1 Timothy 6 17 Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. But we don’t always remember to give thanks to God for all his goodness to us.

It is too easy to take God’s good gifts to us for granted – not only our food but our clothing, our homes, and all the luxuries of life we enjoy while millions are dying without the necessities. We can choose between more foods than we can name or pronounce But billions of people around the world are kept alive by a meagre and monotonous diet. In the Bible the people of Israel lived in an agrarian society. Their world was based on agriculture as its prime means for support and sustenance. Such a society recognises other means of livelihood and work habits but stresses agriculture and farming. This has been the main form of economic organization for most of recorded human history. It was the common way for Medieval European countries to gain wealth which didn’t really change until the agricultural revolution in the 18th century and the growth of cities in the industrial revolution into the 19th century.

Most of the developing world, the global south, still live in agrarian economies. I have had the privilege of two visits to missionaries and churches in Uganda. In 2019 I went with Ruth to Zambia where she worked with a Christian school and orphans project which we still support. In all those very rural villages people have to grow everything they eat. So they live on a very limited diet of a staple carbohydrate, cassava or maize, with vegetables and fruit, and very occasionally fish or meat maybe once or twice a year. They sell any extra crops for money to buy essentials such as cooking oil, salt, candles, soap and toothpaste and toothbrushes. Then when they can they have to buy clothes and shoes and cooking utensils, and then to pay school fees, and medical bills. Spending just a little time in those villages was an indelible reminder not to take God’s blessings for granted but to receive them with gratitude.

Right at the beginning of the Covid lockdown I had what I can only describe as a surreal experience when I went food shopping late one evening. I went looking for a list of 30 essential foodstuffs, but found half the shelves in Sainsbury’s empty. I came back with only five of the items I went looking for, no main meals at all and instead a dozen bizarre things selected from whatever happened to still be there on the shelves. There and then I made myself a promise that I would never ever take for granted all the foods which in normal times are waiting on the shelves for us.

We so easily forget that all our food and drinks only come to us as gifts of God’s grace. We praise the Lord God as Creator of the world, but we often forget that He is also its Sustainer. Without the continuing activity of Almighty God, upholding His creation in love, we would all instantly cease to exist. Harvest gives us an ideal opportunity to pause for a while to give thanks for the countless blessings we receive from the Lord, not least on our dinner plates every day. Here’s an idea for you this week. Thank God for all His blessings in a silent prayer each time you eat a different kind of food. Each different meat. Each different vegetable. Each different fruit. You could count chips separately from mash separately from crisps. Each different kind of drink – the tea-drinker in our house has at least ten varieties of tea. I am sure we will find that we all eat dozens of different foods in a week.

All good gifts around us, ALL good gifts, are sent from heaven above;
then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord, for all his love”

We thank God for our food. But there are so many other blessings we enjoy in everyday life that we can so easily take for granted too. We have just come back from holiday in a country where we were advised not to drink the tap water, or even to cook with it or brush our teeth with it. For me that was a reminder of Uganda and Zambia, where any drinking water had to be collected from springs or boreholes and then carried to the home, sometimes for miles. We should not take safe drinking water for granted. In our lifetimes we have occasionally endured fuel crises, with cancelled buses, and days when drivers couldn’t find the petrol to make their journeys, or times when the lights have gone out for hours. People in many countries face these challenges every day. In Zambia, few people outside the big cities have mains electricity, but the whole country has frequent periods of “load shedding” where power goes out for eight hours at a time.

We should be grateful for our HOMES, warm in winter, dry in the rain, safe from predators. For FAMILY AND FRIENDS. For SAFE TRAVELLING – in many parts of the world every journey begins with a prayer for travelling mercies and ends with thanksgiving for a safe arrival, because for very many people so many journeys are hazardous, if not impossible. We should be grateful for COMMUNICATIONS: mobiles phones and text messages, Zoom and WhatsApp and Facebook. The persecuted church reminds us not to take our CHURCH or our FELLOWSHIP or our BIBLES for granted.
In his book, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, William Law wrote,
“Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world? It is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives most alms, or is most eminent for temperance, chastity, or justice, but it is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God wills, who receives everything as an instance of God’s goodness, and has a heart always ready to praise God for it.”
Jesus teaches us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread”. “Give us today our bread for today.” Every time we pray that prayer it reminds us that God is our provider. It teaches us not to take things for granted but to receive them with gratitude. All our food, and everything we have, ultimately comes from God. We should give thanks to him and not forget his benefits. We should acknowledge our dependence on all God’s gracious provision for us God is indeed Jehovah Jireh, our provider. We live in a world of “instant everything”. All we need and want is readily available on a basis of live now, pay later. It can be so easy to take for granted the luxuries of life, never mind the necessities. So Harvest Festivals are important because they help us to be truly thankful for “our daily bread” and for all the other material blessings we enjoy which countless millions in the world do not.
Psalm 103 1 Praise the LORD, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. 2 Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits –
Count your blessings, name them one by one. Be thankful! Next, much more briefly, two more things.

2. WE SHOULD REMEMBER OTHERS LESS FORTUNATE THAN OURSELVES

We all need a deeper awareness of our dependence on the goodness of God, and our gratitude to Him, for the quality of life we enjoy every day. But at the same time we should remember that every night one billion people in the world go to bed hungry. That is more than 150 times the population of Great Britain.

In an agrarian economy there are always the risks of failure. Harvest is not always guaranteed. Too much rain, too little rain, rain at the wrong times, and you don’t have anything to eat. Plagues of locusts can ruin the crops and in wartorn regions others can steal or destroy them. This weekend many parts of the UK have been hit by Storm Amy. At least one person has died and more than a third of a million homes lost electricity. We were living just down the road when the Great Storm of October 1987 turned Sevenoaks into One Oak overnight and tragically 18 people lost their lives. But most of us have never experienced a true hurricane or a tsunami or an earthquake. These are part of the precarious nature of an agrarian existence which we are almost entirely protected from. When the broccoli crops fail we don’t eat broccoli, we eat a different green vegetable. But while we are noticing rises in the prices of bread and rice – millions of people in many countries are facing disaster.

Thousands of people are starving to death at this moment because of drought or flood or crop failure, or are dying of all kinds of diseases which are caused by an inadequate diet. Acute food shortages lead to catastrophic malnutrition and deaths, especially among children. There have been fewer droughts or floods and better harvests in Southern and Eastern Africa this year, which means those areas are no longer Hunger Hotspots. But sadly, famines are often the result of armed conflict and we are seeing that in Palestine, and Gaza, Sudan and Haiti even now.

There is also poverty in this county of course. Very many pensioners are find it increasingly hard to manage. Millions of people are caught in the debt trap, paying so much in interest they can never pay back any of the capital. Others are in the benefits trap, where they struggle on inadequate benefits since their income would be even lower if they did get a job. They would then lose rent rebate and have to pay so much for child care. Some people, including some teenagers, will be sleeping rough on the streets tonight. But in comparison to many countries of the world, even the poorest here are rich. Few in Britan are starving and none need be. We often take for granted the medical care available to everyone here which is so much better than most of the world enjoy. Compared to very many places around the earth, Colchester is a very safe, comfortable, war-free, and wealthy place to live.

Our Harvest celebrations call us to a fresh appreciation of all these blessings which we enjoy which so many peoples and nations do not. And as we give thanks to God for His goodness to us we are challenged to careful stewardship of all that He has entrusted to us, to “learn to live more simply so others might simply live.” In a small way our gifts to the Food Bank can help others less fortunate than ourselves. Churches usually have some kind of minister’s fund or fellowship fund or communion fund available to help members of the fellowship when required. And I am certain many here are quietly giving to support people in different kinds of need. Counting our blessings prompts us to remember others who have so little when we have so much. As we receive God’s love, it stirs us to generous sacrificial giving in return.

And finally, because we are about to celebrate Communion.

3. THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE OF HARVEST

Sowing and reaping. The process of Harvest itself is a parable with a deep spiritual meaning. For there is a principle at work at Harvest-time which is at once simple and profound. We can call it “the seed principle”. It was summarised in some words of Jesus which are often overlooked.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24)

Here is the principle which farmers and gardeners know all too well. It is only through the lifelessness and apparent death of the seed or the bulb through the winter that new life can come in the spring. We must sacrifice the grain this year if we want a crop next year. We see the same pattern in the butterfly, which emerges to new life only through the death of the caterpillar into the chrysalis. In so many ways the world of nature demonstrates this principle, “through death to life”. In it is revealed part of God’s pattern of working in His world and His design for our living too.

For Jesus, the seed principle was expressed in his self-sacrifice on the cross. It was only because of his death that his resurrection life can come to us also. For us the same principle reminds us of Jesus’s teaching that it is only by dying to self that we are born to eternal life. It prompts us to give thanks to God for our Saviour.

This world devalues self-sacrifice and rewards selfishness. Success is measured by how much people can get and not by how much we give. Harvest-time embodies the seed principle, “through death to life”, and challenges us to live by it too.

Give thanks to God. We’re not always very good at saying “Thank you,” are we? I heard about a little boy who came back from a birthday party. His mother asked him, “Bobby, did you thank the lady for the party?” “Well, I was going to,” the boy replied. “But a girl ahead of me said, ‘Thank you,’ and the lady said, “Don’t mention it.” So I didn’t.”

Count your blessings. Give thanks to God. Remember other people less fortunate than we are. Remember our Creator, remember the Seed Principle, and give thanks for the Lord Jesus Christ, our glorious Saviour!

The Bible books of Joshua and Judges cover around 300 years of the history of Israel between 1400 and 1100 BC. Out of all the events we read about in that period, the best known is certainly what we know as the Battle of Jericho in Joshua chapter 6. However, the most important event by far in all of those centuries is recorded in Joshua 3 and 4 and it would be criminal to gloss over that. So I am going to tackle two passages in one sermon. Thankfully they both teach us exactly the same things.
The Israelites had been wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. In God’s masterplan the time had come for them to enter Canaan and take possession the land flowing with milk and honey which God had promised to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob hundreds of years earlier. There was just one little problem. Canaan was over the other side of the River Jordan. Normally in that region the Jordan would only be 50 feet wide. But actually there was a second little problem because this was the flood season. At that time, due to the spring rains and the snow melting from Mount Hermon the Jordan was probably closer to a mile wide, 12 feet deep and flowing very, very fast. And actually there was another tiny problem because there were somewhere between two and three MILLION Israelites, men women and children, queuing up to cross the Jordan.
It had taken the miracle of God parting the Red Sea for all the Israelites to escape from Egypt. And it would take another miracle for this generation to cross the Jordan and enter the promised land. For Israel, crossing the Jordan would be the most important event between the Exodus and the birth of Samuel and the reign of King David. We have just read about it in Joshua 3 POWERPOINT 1
Joshua 3 14 So when the people broke camp to cross the Jordan, the priests carrying the ark of the covenant went ahead of them. 15 Now the Jordan is in flood all during harvest. Yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge, 16 the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down to the Sea of the Arabah (that is, the Dead Sea) was completely cut off. So the people crossed over opposite Jericho. 17 The priests who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord stopped in the middle of the Jordan and stood on dry ground, while all Israel passed by until the whole nation had completed the crossing on dry ground.
For God’s plan of salvation, the people needed a miracle and God gave them a miracle. This was such a massively important event in the history of Israel that God wanted the people never to forget it. So we read in chapter 4 that Joshua commanded twelve men, one from each tribe, to pick up twelve great stones from the middle of where the Jordan had dried up, and place them beside the bank of the Jordan in Canaan. They would form a memorial,
POWERPOINT 2 Joshua said,
4 6 to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, “What do these stones mean?” 7 tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel for ever.’
It is so easy to forget the miracles God has worked in our lives. Perhaps we need memorial stones to remind us of God’s mighty acts of salvation. In any case, it was this amazing miracle which established Joshua as the leader of the nation.
4 14 That day the Lord exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel; and they stood in awe of him all the days of his life, just as they had stood in awe of Moses.
More than that, news of the miraculous crossing of the Jordan spread throughout Canaan and we read in Joshua 5:1 Now when all the Amorite kings west of the Jordan and all the Canaanite kings along the coast heard how the Lord had dried up the Jordan before the Israelites until they had crossed over, their hearts melted in fear and they no longer had the courage to face the Israelites.
That is the amazing way the Israelites crossed the River Jordan into Canaan and that brings us to our second story. We sometimes call it the Battle of Jericho but in fact there was no battle at all. If we didn’t know the story already, we have just heard how God told Joshua what the Israelites had to do.
On six days, Israel’s army marched around the impenetrable fortress of Jericho, led by seven priests blowing trumpets and following the ark of the covenant. Then they returned to camp for the night. But on the seventh day the army went around the city seven times.
6 16 The seventh time round, when the priests sounded the trumpet blast, Joshua commanded the army, ‘Shout! For the Lord has given you the city!
And then came the battle which wasn’t even a battle. POWERPOINT 3
6 20 When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city.
The walls came tumbling down. The miraculous crossing of the Jordan and the tumbling walls of Jericho both teach us the same very obvious thing.

GOD DID THAT! POWERPOINT 4
This is a truth so self-evident that we can easily overlook it. God did that. It wasn’t Joshua’s leadership or the priests’ obedience which dried up the River Jordan so that the millions of Israelites could enter into the Land of Canaan. It was the mighty act of the Almighty God! God did that! And all the Israelites knew it! POWERPOINT 5
3 9 Joshua said to the Israelites, ‘Come here and listen to the words of the Lord your God. 10 This is how you will know that the living God is among you and that he will certainly drive out before you the Canaanites (and all the other nations) … 13 And as soon as the priests who carry the ark of the Lord—the Lord of all the earth—set foot in the Jordan, its waters flowing downstream will be cut off and stand up in a heap.’
God did that!
4 23 For the Lord your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over. The Lord your God did to the Jordan what he had done to the Red Sea when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over. 24 He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is powerful and so that you might always fear the Lord your God.’
Crossing the Jordan. God did that! And when we come to the so-called battle of Jericho, Joshua knew very well that it was God giving them the victory.
6 2 Then the Lord said to Joshua, ‘See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men.
POWERPOINT 6
God did that! And all the Israelites knew that it was God who had given them the victory.
6:16 Joshua commanded the army, ‘Shout! For the Lord has given you the city!
So despite what Hebrews 11 says, it was not actually the faith of the Israelites which brought down the walls of Jericho. It was the mighty act of the Almighty God. God did that! The same is true of all the important events in God’s masterplan of salvation: the plagues on Egypt, the Passover, the Israelites crossing the Red Sea on dry land and the waters then drowning all the pursuing Egyptian army, the waters from the rock and the manna and quail which sustained the people of Israel in the wilderness for 40 years. It was Almighty God who worked all these amazing miracles. Our God is great big God. God did that! POWERPOINT 7
The Old Testament is not the story of God’s chosen people Israel. It is not the story of great leaders like Moses and Joshua. The most important stories in the Bible are not even the examples of faith and obedience of the great saints which we have been looking at for nearly a year. Instead, at heart the Bible is really the story of the amazing mighty acts of God giving salvation to His people. It’s all about God! God did that!
When it comes the Israelites crossing the Jordan and then taking possession of Canaan, the Old Testament doesn’t talk about the Israelite’s victorious battles. Moses had looked ahead to God giving the promised land to the Israelites like this.
Dt 7:1 | When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations … seven nations larger and stronger than you 2 and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, …
So the Israelites always knew that it was God who would give them the promised land. In the time of the Judges, God reminded his people of this fact. He said,
Judges 6 8… I brought you up out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 9 I snatched you from the power of Egypt and from the hand of all your oppressors. I drove them from before you and gave you their land.
Even centuries later, King Jehoshophat looked back 2 Chronicles 20 “O Lord, God of our fathers, are you not the God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hand, and no one can withstand you. 7 O our God, did you not drive out the inhabitants of this land before your people Israel and give it forever to the descendants of Abraham your friend?
God did that! The Israelites never claimed to have won the battles for themselves. They recognised the truth – God did that! Three things will follow for us too.

WE MUST PRAISE GOD POWERPOINT 8
The Bible talks about praise more than 450 times, and half of those come in the Psalms. Of course we praise God for who He is, almighty, eternal, Creator of heaven and earth. But then we are also called to praise God for his mighty acts of salvation.
Psalm 145 4 One generation will commend your works to another; they will tell of your mighty acts. … 5 They will speak of the glorious splendour of your majesty, …6 They will tell of the power of your awesome works, and I will proclaim your great deeds.
Psa 105 1 Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name; make known among the nations what he has done. 2 Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all his wonderful acts.
Psa 78 4 … we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done.
The Israelites celebrated God’s historic mighty acts of salvation. And it is right that we should also remember and praise God for all he has ever done in our lives too. Our God IS a great big God, and He holds us in His hands!
1 Pet 2:9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
Our God is a great big God. He deserves our praise. Walter Moberley once wrote to Christians, “If one-tenth of what you believe is true, you ought to be ten times as excited as you are.
God has provided us with such an amazing salvation! The least we can do is praise him!

IT’S ALL ABOUT GOD, NOT ABOUT US POWERPOINT 9
God’s masterplan of salvation was never about great leaders and powerful armies. Israel’s salvation and our salvation are all about the mighty acts of God. God did that!
Psalm 44 1 We have heard with our ears, O God; our fathers have told us what you did in their days, in days long ago.
2 With your hand you drove out the nations and planted our fathers; you crushed the peoples and made our fathers flourish.
3 It was not by their sword that they won the land, nor did their arm bring them victory; it was your right hand, your arm, and the light of your face, for you loved them. ….
It’s not about us. It’s all about God. God did that!
6 I do not trust in my bow, my sword does not bring me victory; 7 but you give us victory over our enemies,
Over the decades I have been a minister it seems to me that many Christians and many churches have been forgetting this important truth. I hear people worried about the future of the church. Many Christians and even some ministers talk as though the future of the church rests on our human efforts. We need to welcome people more and love people more and tell more people about Jesus. We need to work harder and be more obedient and pray more and have more faith. These things do matter a bit. But here is the thing. It’s not really about us. It never has been. It never will be. It’s all about God. Our God is a great big God. God did that!
I can sing “I am free, Yet not I but through Christ in me!
I shall overcome, Yet not I, but through Christ in me!
It’s not about us – it’s all about God. And so we cry out

SHOW YOUR POWER O LORD POWERPOINT 10
We can look back at mighty acts of God in the Old Testament, so many occasions when God did that! Our God is a great big God! Then of course as Christians today we are still celebrating Easter and the most amazing and glorious act of divine power when God raised the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. The stone was rolled away. The grave was empty. Jesus had risen from the dead, never more to die. Death has been defeated. Because He lives, we will live also. God did that!
But more than that. The resurrection was the greatest of God’s mighty acts, but it was not the last. Miracles of healing and deliverance and transformed lives continued through the Book of Acts and through the Early Church and through the ages even into the church today. Romans 8:11 tells us that the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in us! Powerpoint 11
Our God is a great big God! The God who piled up the floodwaters of the great River Jordan lives in us. The God who brought down the walls of Jericho lives in us. The God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead lives in us! So we long for the almighty eternal and unchanging God to show his power and send his power, to work mighty acts of salvation even in our lives and in our church.
He longs to do much more than Our faith has yet allowed
To thrill us and surprise us With His sovereign power
Restore, O Lord, The honour of Your name,
In works of sovereign power Come shake the earth again;
His touch has still its ancient power! We can ask and expect that God will still work in power in signs and wonders in our lives and in our church, even today, even in us. Show your power, O Lord. Send your power, O Lord! We long for God to move among US in mighty acts of salvation, so that everyone will praise and glorify God, shouting out “God did that!”

The story of Noah and the Flood is one of the most important stories in the Old Testament. It speaks to us about salvation and God’s faithfulness, as well as the faith of one man in the face of a wicked generation. You can look forward to those happy themes in future weeks. Within the story of the Flood, most preachers try to skip over Genesis chapter 6. But that is where we must begin today. Genesis is one of the most unsettling, disturbing and depressing chapters in the whole Bible. Spoiler alert – everybody is going to die! Much as I would love to dodge preaching on this passage, we can’t. So here goes. Before we get to the good news, we have to start with the bad news – possibly the worst news anybody has ever been given.

11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, ‘I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.
A great big flood is coming! So big it would wipe out all the people and all the animals on the planet. An occurence so destructive that it gives us the truly terrifying English word – a cataclysm. It was what disaster movies love to call an ELE – an extinction level event. And the flood was coming because of all the corruption and violence which had spilled over from human beings to pollute even the earth itself. So the story of the flood begins by confronting us with
THE SERIOUSNESS OF SIN
5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.
Things had gone from bad to worse The only way forward would be for God to send a great big flood and wash all the wickedness and evil and corruption and violence away and wash away all the spilled blood which was tainting the land. That is how bad things had got, due to human sin.
Somehow, in our lifetimes, the world has forgotten the seriousness of sin. I was struck by the slogan I saw a few years ago on a T-shirt. It said, “The only rule is that there are no rules.” That is how very many people live their lives today. “There are no rules.” In earlier generations it was different. Even people who “feared no man” would fear God. Even if they weren’t afraid of being caught and punished by human law, moast people were still afraid of being punished by God. They knew they would face a reckoning one day. Today life is different. The vast majority of people live their lives as if there was no God because they think God doesn’t exist. Many people pick and choose which laws they will obey and which they will ignore. Very many people are content to live just by the eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not get caught.” People have forgotten the seriousness of sin.
Have you ever heard of Billy Sunday? He was probably the most influential evangelist in America in the first two decades of the 20th Century. One of Billy Sunday’s most memorable quotes is this. “One reason sin flourishes is that it is treated like a cream puff instead of a rattlesnake.” The truth is that sin is not an enticing indulgent cream cake. Sin is a rattlesnake – it kills people.
Ezekiel 18:4 and 18:20 both say “The soul who sins will die.” Romans 6:23 says, “The wages of sin is death.” In Noah’s time, the wickedness and corruption and violence of human beings brought death and destruction on them all.
I wonder if you remember, back in the 1970s and 1980s there was a long-running series of television adverts from the National Dairy Council starring many of the popular entertainers of the time: Les Dawson, Barbara Windsor, Cilla Black, Tommy Cooper, Joan Sims, Frankie Howard. I particularly remember one from 1985 which featured Kenneth Williams as Dracula. The simple slogan they used to promote the sales of calorie filled dairy products was created by an up and coming copywriter by the name of Salman Rushdie. “Fresh cream cakes – naughty but nice”. “Naughty but nice”.
A century ago everybody knew what “sin” was. Breaking the Ten Commandments. The seven “deadly sins” of pride, greed, wrath, envy, gluttony, lust and sloth. But over the years the world has softened the meaning of sin. People prefer to talk about selfishness, which points to the effects our sins have on other people and on ourselves. But selfishness completely ignores the truth that sin is most importantly rebellion against the righteous, holy and almighty God. Slowly and subtly, sin has been rebranded as things which may be self-indulgent but are essentially harmless. Just, “naughty, but nice”.
But that is a lie. Genesis 6 shows us that human sin was so serious that God sent a great big flood to wipe out humanity and start all over again. Everybody died. That is the seriousness of sin.
Let’s move on. There are five places in the New Testament which look back to Noah or to the Flood. Only Hebrews 11 verse 7 talks about Noah’s faith. Other passages use the event of the flood to point to a different very important truth –
THE CERTAINTY OF GOD’S JUDGMENT
Genesis 6 5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. 6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.’
Some people think that because God is love, he is too loving to punish human sins. So they think there won’t be any day of judgment. That idea is wrong. The Flood was God’s punishment for sin on Noah’s generation. It stands throughout human history as a dramatic warning of the reality of God’s future judgment on sin which is waiting to come on all people.
2 Peter 2:5 … if (God) he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others; … 9 if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment.
The events of the flood are not just a demonstration of God’s ability to save his own people. The Flood also points to the grim reality of God’s judgment on those who are unrighteous. Since God judged the world then, he will certainly do so again. Metaphorically, an even bigger flood is still coming!
J.B. Phillips “… you may be absolutely certain that the Lord knows how to rescue a good man surrounded by temptation, and how to reserve his punishment for the wicked until his day comes.”
The certainty of God’s judgment. You will see why I was struck by a book by Ray Comfort entitled “Hell’s best kept secret”. What is the great truth that all the powers of evil want to keep secret? What is the fact which would change the world if people only accepted it? Simply the truth that God is a Holy and righteous God and every single human being will one day face judgement for all the wrong things they have done! Judgment is coming.
When Jesus pointed to the events of the Flood, he did so as a warning to his generation to be ready to face the judgment of God on the great day when he will return in glory.
Luke 17 26 “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. 27 People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.”
Matthew 24:39 ends the saying, they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away.
Just like in Noah’s time, most people don’t realise that there is another even bigger flood coming our way – God’s certain judgment on a sinful world. So much of Jesus’s teaching was challenging people to get ready to face God’s inescapable judgment. Think of the parables of the sheep and the goats, of the ten virgins, of the wicked tenants in the vineyard, of the ten gold coins, of the wheat and the weeds, of the net, of the rich fool, of the wedding banquet. Get ready!
Hebrews 9:27 tells us: people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.
Romans 1 in particular warns about God’s judgment on human sin.
Romans 1:18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness. … 21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. …
Paul goes on to name many shameful examples of human sin and immorality.
29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. 30 … they invent new ways of doing evil;
Just read the newspapers or watch the news. Human wickedness and violence continue to corrupt the earth as much as in Noah’s generation. The historical event of the Flood is the solemn warning through the millennia of the certainty of God’s judgment which is to come. An even bigger flood is coming! Which brings us finally and joyfully to
NOAH’S FAITH
This whole sermon series is looking at the great heroes of faith from the Old Testament listed for our inspiration in Hebrews Chapter 11. But the focus in Genesis 6 is not on Noah’s faith. Did you notice that 2 Peter 2 verse 5 celebrates Noah in a different way.
2 Peter 2:5 (God) did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness,
Noah was “a preacher of righteousness”, “a herald of righteousness”. J.B. Phillips translates this verse as “Noah, the solitary voice that cried out for righteousness”. The New Living Translation says, “Noah warned the world of God’s righteous judgment.”
We don’t read about Noah preaching in words but we certainly do see his faith in his actions. First we read about his character and his lifestyle.

Genesis 6:9 “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.” (NIV) Like Enoch who we heard about last week. The Good News Translation says, “Noah had no faults and was the only good man of his time. He lived in fellowship with God.” So Noah’s blameless life was already an example and a rebuke to all the people around him. And then on top of that, Noah expressed his faith by obeying God’s instructions and building his ark, however foolish that made him look. Genesis 6 22 Noah did everything just as God commanded him.
For decade after decade, for almost a hundred years, Noah kept on building. This ark was, to say the least, very big and very conspicuous. Noah would have faced mocking and ridicule. I am certain people would keep coming up to him and asking what on earth he was doing. “Why are you building a huge boat here in the middle of dry land?” Noah would have told them every time, “A great big flood is coming”. And he would have explained to everybody what God had told him. The flood which is coming is God’s judgment on human beings for all their sin and violence and corruption. So not only by his blameless life, but also by building the ark very publicly, Noah was a preacher and herald of God’s righteousness, warning the world of God’s judgment in the cataclysm which was coming.
And that is the challenge Genesis chapter 6 presents to Christians today. Are we prepared to follow Noah’s example and be preachers and heralds of God’s righteousness, by blameless character and courageous obedience to God? Even if we face mocking and ridicule, or worse. Are we willing to stand up and warn the world of the judgment which is coming? The message of the seriousness of sin and the certainty of God’s judgment is just as unpopular in today’s world as it was in the days of Noah. Are we willing to stand up as preachers of God’s truth in this world of postmodern relativism and post-truth which has abandoned very idea of truth? C. S. Lewis once said, “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
Did you see the newspaper reports this week about Hatun Tash. She is an ex-Muslim originally from Turkey. She’s now a Christian convert and street preacher, particularly at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. During her preaching she has been attacked by mobs and wounded with a knife. On one occasion when she was attacked in June 2022, when the police arrived they did not challenge her attackers but instead they arrested Ms Tash and put her in a cell overnight. She has just received an out-of-court settlement of £10,000 from the Metropolitan Police for that wrongful arrest. Amazingly, that is the second time they’ve given her that amount of money: the police had already paid out in October 2022 for two earlier wrongful arrests while she was preaching at Speakers’ Corner. Preachers of righteousness.
In last Monday’s (23/9/2024) Spectator Brendan O’Neill wrote an article: “The plight of Hatun Tash shames Britain.”
“That there is a Christian preacher in 21st-century Britain who has been abused and hounded and slashed with a knife, and yet her name is virtually unknown, is profoundly troubling. It suggests liberals’ commitment to liberty, especially the liberty to utter, is thin indeed. In a more normal era, Tash would have become a cause célèbre, even among lovers of liberty who hated her brash style. … What do we value more – the right of an individual to speak freely or the right of certain groups never to feel offended? Right now, it’s the latter we have sacralised. This is confirmed by both the police’s heavyhanded response to Tash’s (preaching against) Islam and the shameful refusal of the intellectual classes to speak out against the violent harrying of this supposed ‘blasphemer’. These people are sending a message, however unwittingly. They’re saying it is better that a woman be prevented from expressing her deeply-held beliefs than for someone to feel offended by those beliefs. It is better to silence (his inverted commas) ‘blasphemy’ than to hurt a person’s feelings. … The failure of liberals, and the state itself, to defend a preacher’s right to preach will have an awful impact.”
Just as it was in the days of Noah, the world is running ever faster away from God. Are Christians willing to be “preachers of righteousness”, whatever it costs?
I want to finish by sharing a dream I had one night which many folk have agreed was an example of prophecy. This is not an illustration I invented – the Holy Spirit revealed it to me in a dream. One Sunday back in Brentwood I was all prepared to preach a sermon on taking risks for the sake of the gospel. On the Saturday night I dreamed that on the wall of our church I saw a painting. The painting I saw very vividly in my dream showed beautiful fields next to a river on a bright sunny day. On the riverbank a large group of people were having a lovely picnic together as rowing boats were drifting past along the river.
Next in my dream, to the right of that painting on the wall I saw a second painting. That was of a scene further along the same river. Just around a bend, where the people having the picnic could not see, there was a Niagara Falls sized waterfall. All the people in all the boats passing by were plunging to their deaths over the waterfall.
Meanwhile all the time the people on the riverbank in the first painting just went on enjoying their picnic. Nobody was throwing out lifelines to the boats passing by. Nobody was shouting out warnings to the boats. Nobody had even put up a sign saying, “Danger, waterfall ahead.” They just went on enjoying their picnic. Those were the paintings which I saw in my dream.

I am happy to say that the story of Noah and the Flood will bring us plenty of hope and encouragement and inspiration in the weeks to come. But for today, Genesis chapter 6 shows us the seriousness of sin and the certainty of God’s judgment. Are we willing to follow Noah’s example and be preachers and heralds of God’s righteousness? To warn people of the certainty of judgment? Because another great big flood is certainly coming!

The advert in the Samaria Times might have read something like this.
“Situation Vacant: prophet of God, to lead a band of prophets. Must be diplomatic and useful in battle and famines. Miracles, especially raising the dead, an advantage.”
Of course, Elisha didn’t become one of the most influential prophets in Israel’s history by answering a newspaper advert. So how did he end up “in the hot seat” as Elijah’s successor and God’s representative to Israel for 50 years in the ninth century BC? It all started with Elijah calling Elisha to follow him.
1 Kings 19 “19 So Elijah went from there and found Elisha son of Shaphat. He was ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen, and he himself was driving the twelfth pair. Elijah went up to him and threw his cloak around him.”
Elijah’s cloak was a symbol of his gifting and calling as a prophet. When Elijah went and put his cloak on Elisha’s shoulders, he was symbolically inviting him to become a prophet too. Elisha responded to the call as we would hope we would when God calls us. He said yes.
“20 Elisha then left his oxen and ran after Elijah. ‘Let me kiss my father and mother goodbye,’ he said, ‘and then I will come with you.’”
Elijah’s reply at this point may appear confusing.
‘Go back,’ Elijah replied. ‘What have I done to you?’
Different translations can help us see the meaning here. The New Living Translation says, “Go on back, but think about what I have done to you.”
The Message reads, “Go ahead,” said Elijah, “but, mind you, don’t forget what I’ve just done to you.”
With Elijah’s blessing, Elisha said goodbye to his family. And then he did something else.
“21 So Elisha left him and went back. He took his yoke of oxen and slaughtered them. He burned the ploughing equipment to cook the meat and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out to follow Elijah and became his servant.”
Elisha’s response to God’s call gives a perfect example of how anybody should respond when God calls them to serve him.
It began with the CALLING
Elisha didn’t become a prophet because he woke up one day and thought, I’d like to be a prophet. He became a prophet because Elijah called him to. In turn, Elijah only did that because God told him to. Just a few verses before in 1 Kings 19 verse 16 God had said to Elijah, “Anoint Elisha son of Shaphat from Abel Meholah to succeed you as prophet.” So actually it was God who called Elisha to become a prophet. And that’s the way it should always be in God’s service. Ministers don’t become ministers because they want to – but only because God calls them into pastoral ministry. Missionaries only become missionaries when God calls them to the mission field. Deacons and Home Group Leaders and people working with children and young people and indeed anybody who is serving God should only do so when God calls them to. God’s call to Elisha came through Elijah. Sometimes God’s call comes to us when ministers or church leaders or wise friends say, “have you ever thought about doing so and so.” I wonder, what might God be calling YOU to do today? Elisha heard God calling him through Elijah, and he responded to it. But he didn’t become a prophet immediately. Before he could become Elijah’s successor, Elisha had to become his assistant.
“Then Elisha set out to follow Elijah and became his servant.”
Elisha became Elijah’s attendant, his helper. The same word was used of Joshua’s relationship with Moses. Delivering God’s unpopular messages of judgment to Israel would not be easy. Elisha needed a period as an attendant, a time of training, of growing, of learning from his Spiritual Elder before he could take over the role of Prophet to God’s people.
A very biblical word for this process would be
DISCIPLESHIP
Elisha became Elijah’s disciple. The idea of discipleship isn’t very fashionable in the church today. Many people want to get stuck into a job straight away – they don’t like the idea of spending time as an apprentice or an assistant. On the contrary, the truth is that whatever the role in the church or in the world, everybody benefits from an opportunity to learn from somebody more experienced, being trained and encouraged and supported. As a chemistry teacher I was so grateful to learn from senior colleagues, and starting a minister I spent five years as Assistant Minister before I had my own church. Whatever the task in church life, Deacons, Home Group Leaders, Youthwork and Children’s Work, it is good to learn from those who have been doing the job for years. Passing on the baton of service in the church. If the great prophet Elisha needed to start off as an apprentice, so do we.
God called Elisha to a period of years of discipleship. And that took
COMMITMENT
“21 So Elisha left him and went back. He took his yoke of oxen and slaughtered them. He burned the ploughing equipment to cook the meat and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out to follow Elijah and became his servant.”
When the Romans invaded Britain 2000 years ago, the emperor Julius Caesar famously said, “if you want to take the island, burn the boats.” With no way to retreat, the soldiers would have no alternative but to march forward. Elisha didn’t burn his boats or his bridges but instead he did burn the plough and the oxen which were his livelihood. No turning back. For Elisha this was a radical break with the past. He was giving up everything he knew, to follow God’s calling to a new destiny, with a new lifestyle, and new priorities.
Calling, discipleship, commitment. Elisha would need one more very important thing before he could step into the hot seat as God’s prophet to Israel. But I’m not allowed to talk about it today because that is next week’s subject, so you’ll just have to come back for that. No spoilers.
So what does this story of how God makes a prophet have to say to Christians today? Elisha was CALLED. In the church it is not only prophets and ministers and missionaries who are called. All Christians are called by God. We are called from darkness to light and from death to life. We are called to be God’s children. We are called to be holy, set apart for God. We are called to tell other people about Jesus. Supremely, we are called to follow Jesus – just like Jesus called his first disciples.
Mark 1:14 “… Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!’
16 As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 17 ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people.’ 18 At once they left their nets and followed him.”
“Come, follow me.” DISCIPLESHIP is not just for Old Testament prophets and ministers and missionaries. Christians are called to repent and believe the gospel and we are also all called to become disciples of Jesus. The Bible only uses the word “Christian” three times and the word “believer” only 30 times. Much more often, around 100 times, the Gospels and Acts talk about people being followers of Jesus, and following Jesus. That is what God calls Christians to do. To be the people who obey that simple command. “Follow me.” And then the New Testament word which is used over 300 times to describe followers of Jesus is “disciple”. Jesus was a Rabbi, a teacher, and those who followed him and learned from him and whose lives were shaped by him were called his disciples. All Christians are called to be disciples of Christ.
Discipleship is about learning. It is about obedience. And it is about passion. Somebody once said, “If one tenth of what you Christians believe is true, you should be ten times as excited as you are!” So the church needs to be making disciples. That is precisely what Jesus commanded his followers to do in Matthew 28:19. Make disciples. Part of that process is learning from older and wiser and more experienced Christians. There are many things in life which we learn by watching others. The piano teacher, the driving instructor, the personal trainer and the life coach all show us HOW TO do what we want to do. The best way to learn to speak French is to spend time with a Frenchman. So also in the Christian life there are individuals who inspire and encourage us by their passion in prayer, their boldness in evangelism, their commitment to holiness and their complete devotion to God. From their examples we learn skills, attitudes and character. We learn hospitality, patterns of prayer and devotional reading. We learn how to cope with life. We seek to imitate their work/life/church balance. We are fired by their wisdom, zeal and love. They are our role models. We catch their faith. As other people share their lives with us, we learn from them how to share our own life with other people. So much in the Christian life is better caught than taught! We need to be making disciples.
Older Christians – is there a young Christian you are supporting and teaching and encouraging in the early years of their faith? By your word and example?
Younger Christians – is there an older Christian you look up to and are learning from and sharing with and praying with?
Making disciples, one-to-one. The late Jascha Heifetz was a child prodigy. He became the highest paid virtuoso violinist in the world by the age of 18, and was widely regarded as the greatest in the twentieth century. When he retired from performing he became a professor of music. Heifetz explained his change of career like this: “Violin playing is a perishable art.” “It must be passed on as a personal skill; otherwise it is lost.” Living the Christian life is the same – it is a perishable art which must be passed on. We need to be making disciples.
And discipleship demands
COMMITMENT
Commitment is not just for prophets and ministers and missionaries. When Jesus said “Follow me” to Simon and Andrew, we read, “18 At once they left their nets and followed him. They left their nets.”
“19 When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. 20 Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.”
Like Elisha, those first disciples gave up everything they knew, they left their nets and their lives behind to follow Jesus on the road. They were completely committed. Some people are only involved in following Jesus – others are committed to him. It was the great tennis player Martina Navratilova who once said, “The difference between involvement and commitment is the difference between ham and eggs. In ham and eggs the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.” Being a true disciple of Jesus requires commitment. As Billy Graham said, “Salvation is free, but discipleship costs everything we have.”
Commitment is for every Christian. Remember what Jesus said to his disciples. “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross (daily) and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24). And another saying is even more challenging: “those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.” (Luke 14:33). Jesus deserves nothing less than our total commitment to him.
We just sang Stuart Townend’s hymn:
“I will feed the poor and hungry, I will stand up for the truth;
I will take my cross and follow To the corners of the earth.
And I ask that You so fill me With Your peace, Your power, Your breath,
That I never love my life so much To shrink from facing death.”
God calls every believer to follow in the steps of Elisha the prophet: calling, discipleship, commitment. Dedication, devotion, sacrifice. If this all sounds very hard, very costly, very, demanding, that is exactly what it is. But don’t be discouraged. Let me leave you with some inspiring words from the missionary martyr Jim Elliott. “That man is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.” Calling. Discipleship. Commitment. Because Jesus is worth it!

North Springfield Baptist Church
Off Havengore, Chelmsford CM1 6JP UK

Sunday Worship 10.30 am and midweek activities

New website coming soon

Email contact@northspringfieldbaptistchurch.org
Text: 07963166459

In one of his last letters, the apostle Paul wrote to his apprentice, Timothy, “The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Tim 2:2). In my final series of sermons, I have been sharing with you ten “things you have heard me say” over the last 12 years which I hope you might remember and wish to pass on. Over the weeks I have generally been applying them to our individual lives as disciples of Jesus. But today as a final encouragement I want to apply them to North Springfield Baptist Church as a church and as a fellowship of believers. Building up in order of importance here are the ten themes once again.
The church still needs ministers
North Springfield Baptist Church have always allowed me to do what a minister is called to do: to equip and support all the members of the church to play the different parts God has for each and every one of us to play in the life and work of the church. You have set me free to provide you with preaching and teaching and pastoral care and vision. Nobody has ever tried to tell me how to be your minister or tried to micromanage me. You really cared for me and Ruth and our children and patiently supported me through periods of illness. It has been a joy and a privilege to serve you as your minister and I am sure you will treat my successor the same way.
Hebrews 13 7 Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.
Science and Christian faith – not either/or but both/and
This theme has always been important to me from my background studying and teaching science. But North Springfield Baptist Church clearly agree. You have affirmed my understanding of the relationship between science and faith and between creation and evolution. Recently you have bravely embraced the challenges of digital church and adjusted to Zoom services and streaming to Facebook and even hybrid services. I will always be interested in science and continue to dabble with computers. Let us all keep our eyes open to the world God has created to reveal its Designer to us.
Psalm 19 1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.
3 They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them.
4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

Church is not an optional extra for Christians
You also believe this. I have never found another church where the members and congregation are so faithful in attending Sunday services and midweek meetings and activities. But we must never lose the vision that the church is not a human organisation or a business or a club. The church is the body of Christ, the household of God and the new temple made out of living stones where God lives by His Holy Spirit. Going into a pastoral vacancy, with different preachers each week, and with keeping the church on the road taking up lots of energy, there is always a danger that folk can lose some of their enthusiasm for the fellowship. So let me remind you of these words from Hebrews chapter 10.
23 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
Being a disciple is very important
You also all recognize this vital truth. Jesus calls every Christian to follow him and to be his disciple. Let us all keep on praying the disciple’s prayer. Lord Jesus Christ – day by day, may I see you more clearly, love you more dearly and follow you more nearly, day by day.
You are committed in prayer and Bible reading and worship and practical Christian service. For a small church, North Springfield Baptist Church achieves an enormous amount through our services and midweek activities and special events and this is down to the dedication and hard work of so many people. Galatians 6:9 encourages us:
9 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. 10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.
Effective outreach to today’s world is vital
This church was planted to share the Good News of Jesus in a new community and we have never lost that vision. The church exists to preach the gospel and with all the new developments in Beaulieu and Channels our missionfield is larger than ever. We have explored new ways of reaching out, from events like the Family Fun Day, Christingle and Christmas Crafternoon and visiting speakers like Janey Lee Grace and Susie Flashman-Jarvis, to delivering Christmas and Easter Cards and paid adverts on Facebook. For me perhaps the most exciting of our projects has been Haven Café, and we are thrilled that a number of people came to faith in Jesus starting from breakfasts at the Café. I think it will be great if Haven Café can start again at some point, but in the meantime I encourage you to also pursue the exciting opportunities out there to use videos and social media for outreach. I hope to keep on doing that kind of digital mission in some form in years to come. We must all keep on stepping out in faith to share Jesus with this needy world. Remember what Jesus promised all his disciples in Acts 1:8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’
The Bible remains central to Christian life and faith
Perhaps the greatest sadness in all my years of ministry has been to see so many churches and preachers departing from the faith which has been handed down to us. So many have lost confidence in the Bible as the supreme authority for Christian faith and practice and given in to pressures from the world around of postmodern relativism and post-truth. But definitely not this church! North Springfield Baptist Church has never compromised and always remained faithful to the Bible. This is demonstrated in your appetite for Bible preaching and teaching in services and Bible Studies. I have particularly enjoyed the discussions we sometimes have in our Sunday evenings. For myself, with more time on my hands I may well dig deeper into academic New Testament studies trying to unravel the mystery the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete in John’s Gospel. Meanwhile, I encourage all of us to continue to stand up for the truth. “What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you – guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us” (2 Tim 1:13-14).
Jude verse 3 in THE MESSAGE tells us all to “fight with everything you have in you for this faith entrusted to us as a gift to guard and cherish”.
The work of the Holy Spirit is essential
You believe this. It is God the Holy Spirit who gives us new life as individual believers and who makes us into the church. Eleven dead men don’t make a football team. North Springfield Baptist Church has always been eager to experience the Holy Spirit manifested in spiritual gifts, to hear God speaking in prophecy and dreams and visions, and for God to work among us in supernatural ways, in signs and wonders and miracles of healing and deliverance. The person and work of the Holy Spirit is not a doctrine to be understood but a reality to be experienced. Jesus promised in Luke 11:13 how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’ Keep on asking. Keep on seeking. Keep on knocking! I will.
Eternal life is our relationship with God
Being a Christian is not about coming to church services, or reading the Bible, or even telling other people about Jesus. Being a Christian is about God’s free gift of eternal life which brings us into a living relationship with God as our loving heavenly Father. It is easy to be distracted by other things but never lose this focus. It’s all about knowing Jesus. Being a Christian is not intellectual knowledge about God but instead about knowing God personally. 2 Peter 1:3 makes the point this way: “Everything that goes into a life of pleasing God has been miraculously given to us by getting to know, personally and intimately, the One who invited us to God” (THE MESSAGE). Paul prayed this for the Christians at Ephesus. “I ask the God of our Master, Jesus Christ, the God of glory—to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing Him personally” (Ephesians 1:17 THE MESSAGE). Although they shouldn’t, sometimes the tasks of ministry can get in the way of a minister’s own personal relationship with God. I won’t have that excuse any more. I encourage every one of us to press on to know God better and better.
Prayer is at the heart of our relationship with God
One of the most wonderful things about North Springfield Baptist Church is your appetite for prayer. The Early Church devoted themselves to prayer, and so do we. Talking with other ministers, it appears that NSBC are relatively rare in sustaining a weekly mid-week prayer meeting like Draw Near To God. Our Saturday Mornings of Prayer and Weeks of Prayer and Fasting have been very special times. And the times of open prayer in our services are very important. Spurgeon said, “Whether we like it or not, asking is the rule of the Kingdom. I don’t feel I need to encourage you to keep on praying – I know you will. I will just remind you of Ephesians 6 18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.
And so we come to the most important truth of all. I hope that through the years, my ministry has made it easier rather than harder for everyone who has seen and heard me to follow Jesus. But more than that I hope that everybody will have heard this message.

God loves you!
God loves us more than we can possibly imagine with a love which will never let us go. I have a beautifully calligraphed plaque on my desk which has been placed where I can look at it all the time in every study for the last 30 years. It reminds me of the calling before me to be a minister. It is not a Bible verse, but instead the first verse of a song I learned when I first became a Christian.
“Tell my people I love them. Tell my people I care.
When they feel far away from me, tell my people I’m there.”
This is the simple message at the heart of the Good News about Jesus Christ. God loves you. God cares about you. However tough life may be, whatever may be dragging you down or dragging you away from God, God is always there for you. This is God’s message for every one of us today, and every day. God wants us all to be certain of just how much He loves us.
At a very challenging and painful time in my life, when I was at university and leading the College Christian Union, God used one particular passage in Isaiah to assure me of His love for me. It was as if those words which were originally addressed to God’s chosen people had been written just for me. Hear these verses as God’s words to you today.
Isaiah 43 But now, this is what the LORD says—
he who created you, Jacob, he who formed you, Israel:
‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.
2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.
3 For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour;
I give Egypt for your ransom, Cush and Seba in your stead.
4 Since you are precious and honoured in my sight, and because I love you,
I will give people in exchange for you, nations in exchange for your life.
5 Do not be afraid, for I am with you;

God loves you! God loves us with unconditional love which will never let us go. The Bible assures us in so many places just how much God loves us. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the supreme demonstration of God’s love for us. I know you know God’s love because of the love you have all shown for me as your minister over the last 12 years.
1 John 3 14 We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other.
I am certain you have received God’s love in your hearts because of the love you all show towards each other in so many practical ways. We love because God first loved us! That is our witness to the world as we obey Jesus’s New Commandment
John 13 34 … As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
God loved us all so much that He gave his only Son to die on the cross in our place.
1 John 4 9 This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
Here is my final encouragement to us all. Keep on loving each other. Keep on caring and sharing and bearing one another’s burdens. As we each experience for ourselves the amazing love of God, we must keep on loving each other and welcoming new people into the church and reaching out into the community with God’s kind of love.
So there you are. Paul urged Timothy, “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it” (2 Tim 3:14 in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition 2021). In this final sermon I have laid out ten things I am passionate about which I have learned and which I confidently believe. I have discussed them all in my book, “Continue in what you have learned and believed,” and I hope you will all be happy to take a copy. In all these areas I will seek to remain tentatively definite, holding faithfully to the truth as I have grasped it so far whilst always open to continuing to learn new things. May you do the same. May we all receive God’s abundant grace to “Stick with what you learned and believed” (as the Message puts it.)

In one of his last letters, the apostle Paul wrote to his apprentice, Timothy, “What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching with faith and love in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 1:13). He repeated that exhortation. “And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Tim 2:2). As I reach retirement from pastoral ministry, I have been reflecting. Which of “the things you have heard me say” would I most hope the churches I have served might remember and wish to pass on?
Through the years, I hope my ministry has made it easier rather than harder for other people to follow Jesus. Within that, here are ten vital truths which have shaped and characterised all my preaching and teaching, beginning with the most important.
1 God loves you!
2 Eternal life is our relationship with God
3 Prayer is at the heart of our relationship with God
4 The work of the Holy Spirit is essential
5 The Bible remains central to Christian life and faith
6 Effective outreach to today’s world is vital
7 Being a disciple is very important
8 Church is not an optional extra for Christians
9 Science and Christian faith – not either/or but both/and
10 The church still needs ministers
These principles have always been important to me, and this compilation of sermons and articles explores them in turn. Paul also urged Timothy, “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it” (2 Tim 3:14 in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition 2021). That is my hope and my prayer for myself, for my friends and for my churches: keep on going.
I have put these important messages together in my new book, “Continue in what you have learned and believed”, published by the College of Baptist Ministers. If you would like an free electronic copy, or to buy a print edition, do get in touch!